Physics: What We Do and Don’t Know by Steven Weinberg
Excerpt: For life to evolve, the dark energy could not be much larger than the value we observe, and there is no reason for it to be any smaller.Such crude anthropic explanations are not what we have hoped for in physics, but they may have to content us. Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.”
My comment: Physicists may never know enough to contribute to intelligent discussions about biophysical constraints on nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled adaptations. I continue to find only antagonists with their “crude anthropic explanations” while attempting to find a biophysicist who could help explain something about the conserved molecular mechanisms of nutrient uptake. For example, physicists seem unable to start with what biologists know about cells and progress towards understanding of the adaptations that lead from unicellular to multicellular organisms, which somehow became able to sexually reproduce.
Instead, physicists start with what they think they know about energy outside the cell and expect biologists to understand how the energy of the universe is relevant to adaptations that biologists have observed in living organisms. It’s as if physicists and mathematicians don’t realize the energy from outside the cell must get inside the cell for adaptations in cells to occur.
Perhaps that is why input from physicists is no longer being accepted in the context of evolutionary theory. Clearly, physics provided nothing but vague anthropic speculation, and evolutionary theorists must have more than that to move forward. See for example Evolution of transcriptional enhancers and animal diversity (excerpted below). Thus, evolutionary theorists have abandoned the laws of physics and are proceeding with attempts to “explain at the molecular level how endless forms… evolved.” Here’s the best explanation I’ve seen: “It rather seems that a wide variety of peculiar molecular mechanisms perform, together, the complex task of putting the genome in action, in each cell type of each animal species, at every moment in life and under every possible physiological and environmental circumstance.”
In other words, the best explanation of how energy gets from outside the cell to inside the cell is that it just happens so that the evolution of animal diversity can also just happen. I think that may help to show how the nonsense of evolutionary theory is destined to remain nonsense even after the nonsense of physics is removed from evolutionary biology.
